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gandhi_2 writes "A pair of sibling scholars compared 52 artists' renditions of 'The Last Supper', and found that the size of the meal painted had grown through the years. Over the last millennium they found that entrees had increased by 70%, bread by 23%, and plate size by 65.6%. Their findings were published in the International Journal of Obesity. From the article: 'The apostles depicted during the Middle Ages appear to be the ascetics they are said to have been. But by 1498, when Leonardo da Vinci completed his masterpiece, the party was more lavishly fed. Almost a century later, the Mannerist painter Jacobo Tintoretto piled the food on the apostles' plates still higher.'"

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Historians were also both pleased and horrified by the recent unearthing of a rendition of the Last Supper by Michaelangelo. While the portion sizes are closer to what is believed to be accurate, the painting also features such embellishments as a kangaroo, twenty eight disciples, and three Christs.

However the card attached to the painting is actually labeled "The Penultimate Supper", and historians must admit there are no records of how many people attended that gathering.

Everyone has blinders (or sets of presuppositions) - to assume otherwise is ignoring reality. If I begin a project in web design, I have a certain set of presuppositions about how things go together - this on the basis of general consensus. If I begin a project involving history, I begin with a certain set of presuppositions (If I set out to do a project on what the food was at the Last Supper, I would generally have to have as a presupposition that the meal happened).

Being scholarly does not mean rejecting presupposition but rather working towards a greater understanding of a given topic while understanding the presuppositions upon which my research is based.

And if we really want to get down to it, the whole reason we have "scholarly" pursuits is because of the medieval "scholastics" who were almost uniformly religious in some respect.

(If I set out to do a project on what the food was at the Last Supper, I would generally have to have as a presupposition that the meal happened).

But... But... But - This was a study on how the Last Supper was portrayed, not what was actually served. Those who don't want to posit that there ever was a Last Supper could view this as being intellectually equivalent to a study looking at the chronology of changes in Wonder Woman's apparent bra size. You don't have to believe she actually existed to study changes in depictions of her.

...and if we take into account the fact that this was focused more on the historical end of things, it even more meets the op's apparent definition of "scholar" (as someone without religious presupposition).

There are also a number of PhD students out there right now no doubt working on articles like this one [nature.com] regarding the academic side of pretty much everything including super hero clothing.

I see no reason to deny at least a subgroup of religiously motivated biblical scholars the "scholar" status. Anyone who doubts that should find a well-trained catholic theologian to discuss with. First, they do a lot of serious literary/language/history study, second, even within the realms of dogma, where you might question their axioms (as I do), they usually are well-trained in logic and able to deliver a hell of an argument. Not every religious scholar is a frothing at the mouth evangelical - that is pretty much an American phenomenon.

While it is certainly more common to find protestants or baptists as opposed to catholics here, "frothing at the mouth evangelicals" are not "American". Besides, I know countless protestants today who are more scholarly in their pursuits (whether you agree with their presuppositions or not) than the average "expert scholar" we see talking on TV. If you don't believe me, just consider how faith motivates people to the greatest extents. And it's no different when it comes to the study of theology/history

Didn't mean to generalize over every protestant/baptist there - just saying that a certain, especially rabid and vocal brand is mostly an American phenomenon. No doubt that there is respectable, serious biblical scholar work done by members of all denominations.

You seem to missing the towel headed bombers that foam at the mouth.
The ones that deny the holocost and blame the US for the earthquake in Haiti.
The Catholic church may not change dogma with each scientific discovery,
but they are far from the biggest luddites on the planet.

Just been discussing Christianity here, to stay vaguely on the topic of "biblical scholarship". Of course there are other flavours of serious religious study that I can respect, and, as you mention, other flavours of batshit-crazy nuts. Those shall be discussed some other day, though.

I only know a bit about the ancient greek habits - the strength was probably about the same as today, given that the winemaking techniques are not fundamentally different. It was, however, almost always watered down. There are different accounts on the amount of watering - during a symposion, one person, the symposiarch, was in duty of the watering. The mostly used ratio probably was 3 parts water on 2 parts wine. I think Plutarch discusses the matter in depth *somewhere*, but I'd have to dig deeper to find a quotation. Drinking the wine pure was often considered barbaric or even dangerous, apart from medical use.

The use for making the water safe is obvious, but there also was a huge culture surrounding wine, with ancient greek wine critics going into details just as the modern ones. It was also common to flavour the wines by adding honey, herbs or spices.

Yes, but that's a scientific paper printed in a black-and-white journal, where space is frequently at a premium. I would relevant expect pictures in a presentation poster (if they have one, I don't know how common that is in their field) or a website (and indeed, there are pictures on the mindlesseating.org website). It's all a matter of providing appropriate content for the context, something newspaper failed to do. I mean seriously, did nobody over there realize that having a couple hundred words about re

AC wins. I see painters modernizing the scenes because their own standard of living improves. Especially as they moved into the Reubenesque period, where fatness was attractive because it meant you could afford food without having to work 16 hour days growing it. They would have lacked insight such as it being a Passover Sedar, and instead made it a normal meal for the time.

I assume the intent is to show that people got fatter throughout time, especially since it was published in International Journal of

This story proves tow things: The first is obviously that size matters when it comes to food. And the second which is slightly more deep: Slashdot is indeed about stuff that matters... sometimes. Food!

Leonardo's Last Supper is not exactly what most of us would describe as a pig-out. We see about one bread roll for each disciple and two or three dishes of what looks like some undetermined Indian takeaway, washed down with a few glasses of red wine. Big deal.

This would have been their idea of a feast. The fact that an Italian interpretation 1500 years later doesn't "get it" is not surprising. The fact that a scholar of any sort 2000 years later fixates on it is somewhat absurd.

Substitute "last supper" with "thanksgiving" and you will have something resembling a proper cultural context. Then contemplate your comparisons.

Yes, but the discussion is about "increasing" size of meals in artistic representations. Leonardo shows us very few dishes in his painting. Furthermore, he obviously has no interest in biblical scholarship, since the Passover Seder is supposed to involve unleavened bread. The bread rolls we see in his painting seem unusually (though not impossibly) plump for something produced without the assistance of yeast.

...I wanted to give the impression of a real last supper. You know, not just any old last supper. Not like a last meal or a final snack. But you know, I wanted to give the impression of a real mother of a blow-out, you know?

Using the size of the diners' heads as a basis for comparison, the Wansinks used computers to compare the sizes of the plates in front of the apostles, the food servings on those plates and the bread on the table.

Maybe people's heads have just been getting smaller? It would sure explain a lot.

Actually, meant as a joke but perhaps not without a grain of truth. We know, for instance, that the renaissance period was when the trend to more realistic artistic interpretations really began to gain momentum. Can we automatically assume that the scale of the heads in paintings from the middle ages weren't slightly oversized?

No it just looks like an attempt to get a scientific paper published with doing as little work as possible.

"My plan is to take a ruler to some old paintings and then publish the findings! Oh I can't get access to the works? Well then I'll just use google images and measure them with my com-pu-tor! Prize money please!"

It also depicts them as a bunch of white guys.No, I'm not suggesting that Jesus was black. But he probably wasn't white.

How many black guys would you have seen in a European congregation circa AD 1000?

Ecclesiastical art has two roots:

It illustrated and taught the Biblical narrative to an audience that could not read Hebrew, Latin or Greek. It engaged the laity even more directly by commissioning works from local artists and craftsman, whose work is most vital and appealing when it is closest to their own e

Artistic License. The artists at the time were portraying this painting in their own eye, during times that when food was increasing in supply. Same deal with Rockwell and his work.

This is a riot that a obesity study group would try to connect the lines between historic and religious art with obesity. That is rather like trying to associate American League Football with blood sports.

Beginning early in the 2d Millennium, the Catholic Church started burning many true ascetics (e.g., the Cathars) as heretics. (They of course then expanded the powers of the Inquisition to include, well, anyone their twisted logic could rationalize to oppress.)

No doubt this led to a change in the way people perceived heroes from religious history. Da Vinci may never have even considered the idea that an apostle was an ascetic. The Inquisition was in full force, and in charge of most of the governments and virtually all of the churches of Europe, when he painted that picture.

I wouldn't say that the ascetic nature of the Cathars was the main factor for their prosecution - sure, the dualistic nature of their creed, damning everything material, which led to their rather ascetic lifestyle was a factor, but their excommunication and prosecution was mostly founded in the fact that they established the first serious counter-church. They called themselves the "True Christians" after all. The prime motivation was therefore political rather than dogmatic, at least in my opinion. The chur

The church demonized the Cathars' practices. In doing so, they couldn't help but give asceticism a stigma, and to marginalize it. (NB for other readers: the Cathars were Christ worshippers who took any bodily pleasure as sinful, to the point that any sensation at all could be so. Eating food, even just touching another human being on the skin, was eschewed by the Perfecti, those who took on the ultimate rite of the Cathars. These people were, in a word, nuts. But the Catholics were more nuts, and paranoid

Oh, I completely agree that the prosecution of the Cathars left a stigma on ascetic practice - the tolerated ascetics after that were indeed mostly on the fringe of the church. How far asceticism really could have grown to become a core tenet of catholicism at this point is open for discussion in my opinion. Personally, I think the church was set on its way earlier. The strong ascetic lines of belief probably lost their chance to power in the early consolidation of dogma and canonical law up to the Council

I think your facts about persecution are a little off; Thomas de Torquemada, the man responsible for the Spanish inquisition (bet you didn't expect that) was an ascetic, and was a contemporary of Leonardo. There may be different ideas about what exactly an ascetic was, but certainly St Francis of Assisi must be considered one, the guy walked barefoot everywhere, and he was certainly accepted by the catholic church.

It may be hard for someone who hasn't been involved in religion to understand, but not all

Asceticism declined after Aquinas put Catholic theology on an Aristotelian basis (contra the more dualistic Platonism of Augustine). This revalued matter and nature in theology, which changed from being something generally inimical to the contemplative and spiritual life to something generally supportive of, and in cases conducive to it; this became the foundation for art and science moving forward. If we had a Slashdot poll, "What idea created western civilisation", this would get my vote. As a side-effect

The researchers are, I think onto something here, but not what everyone seems to think. I saw this story carried on another site originally, and so I am willing to give it more credit than I would a typical "Idle" story... having read TFA, I suggest this merits our attention. The implication of the article is that it has to do with obesity, and although there may exist a very distant relationship, I don't think the obesity connection is what we should consider. No, I think it may be a function of the am

A probably OT point on etymology - but why is it that in the USA that the main course is called the "entrée"? The first time I had dinner in the USA it had me momentarily confused because you'd expect the "entrée" to be the starter, not the main course (in French, the "entrée" is the starter).

Why is this here? Is it that anything with a little math is considered worthy of/.? So if I made an article which compares breast implant trends from the 60's to now as long as I used math it would make it here?